Parsha Review Podcast · Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe

You're listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe of TORCH in Houston, Texas. This is the Parsha Review Podcast.

Good morning, everybody. It is so wonderful to be back here at the TORCH Center. The magnificent rain that is blessing our city. Everyone stay safe, drive safely. We need to catch up on Parsha's Shemini. Parsha's Shemini tells us about the inauguration of the Temple, the excitement that went along with it. We also have the laws of kosher, which animals are kosher, which animals are not kosher, what we can and what we cannot eat.
But if we look at chapter number 10, we see the incredible story of Nadav and Avihu, the children of Aaron. They each took their fire pen and they put in them fire. And they put in it incense and they brought them before Hashem an alien fire that God did not command them. And the fire came forth from Hashem and it consumed them and they died before Hashem. And then the verse tells us that God takes his chosen ones. Those are the ones he sanctifies.
And we see that the great level of Aaron's trust, reliance in Hashem, where he is silent in the judgment, he accepts it completely. It says, that when someone is silent, it's their admittance. They're saying, yes, I approve, I acknowledge. And this is what Aaron is saying with his silence. OK, but I want to focus on something else here. If we look a little bit further, a few verses later, Hashem gives a very specific commandment based on what just transpired. And it's as follows,
Hashem spoke to Aaron, saying, Wine that is intoxicating, do not drink. And like this, you will not die. This is a decree that is eternal for all generations. So what do we see from this very simple verse? When you come to serve in the temple, do not be drunk. Don't be intoxicated. In order to distinguish between the sacred and between the profane, and between the contaminated and between the pure. And now one more verse, which teaches us something really masterful.
And to teach the children of Israel all the decrees. That Hashem had spoken to them through Moshe. So there's two commands here. The first command, don't come serve in the temple. Don't bring an offering intoxicated. This is specifically to the Kohanim, those who bring the offerings in the temple. And then additionally, there's another command. Don't teach Torah when you're drunk. You're not allowed to teach Torah when you're drunk. And this is really an interesting law. We have to understand what is really going on here.
Why is G-d giving us such a command? Why is G-d giving us such a command? If we look, so Rashi says, What happens when you drink wine? You get drunk. What happens when you drink alcohol? You get drunk. It's the result. Stay away from it. Because the drunkenness, the wine is not the problem. The drunkenness is the problem. Which by the way, a friend of mine, he likes to say, Rabbi Feldheim, he says that this is an unscientific study.
The people, the category of society that is least drunk are wine tasters. Why? They taste the wine. But if you want to be able to still have consciousness on what you're tasting, you can't drink too much. So they take a little sip, they spit it out. They have the flavor, but they don't allow it to intoxicate them, because then you lose it. That's the big problem. If someone really enjoys alcohol, see a professional for help.
But also, if you drink too much, you're not going to enjoy it anymore. Because you lose your senses. You're not going to be able to discern the flavor anymore. Rashi continues, And to separate between, to distinguish between the sacred and the profane. See, he says like this, you have to be able to distinguish between holy and unholy. You have to be, what is the essence of service in the temple? Being able to distinguish between holy and unholy. What is the essence of the service of a teacher?
To distinguish between holy and unholy. That means what's the job, what's the responsibility of someone who is a teacher of Torah? Is to guide and to decipher between the side of holiness and the side that lacks holiness. The Lahoros, That someone that is drunk cannot provide halachic guidance. And even to the point where, because he's going to confuse between what is right and what is wrong. What is holy and what is unholy. What is pure, what is impure. He can result, it can result in death.
Wrongful judgment by a rabbi could be a terrible, terrible, devastating reality. Okay, so he's saying just like the Kohanim cannot serve when they're drunk. The rabbis cannot serve when they are drunk because the effects are severe. So what's really, what's the Torah really teaching us here? And I think that this is something which is fundamental in our acquisition of Torah. When we come, we study Torah. What's the job of Torah? You know, Gary for many years, we have a hidden scholar in our room.
Gary for many, many years, which I would see him every morning with his Talmud in his hand, coming out of his pickup truck. And he would come, in young Israel of Houston, he would come in to learn Dafyomi. For years, every morning, 7 a.m., you'd see him walking in with his Gemara to study Torah. What are we doing when we study Torah? What we are doing when we're studying Torah is we're communicating with God. How, what is the purpose of the Torah?
What is the purpose of the Torah? The Torah God gave us, the Torah, to communicate with us, to guide us, to give us the instructions of how to live life. So if we want to connect with God, what's the best way to do that? Learn his Torah. I mentioned this previously, but I was in one of the Houston synagogues, Congregation Torah of Chesed. Rabbi Yaghobian has a very vibrant synagogue here in Meyerland.
And one of the things that he mentioned over the course of the Shabbos that I was there, is he stopped everyone in the middle of the reading of the Torah, which is very common, you know, for such a, you know, it's like, it's not the most exciting part of synagogue is when they read the Torah. So what happens is, is that sometimes you get to talk to the person next to you. What's going on? How are you? How is your week?
How's your family? How's your friends? How's your job? How's your vacation? How's this? You know, people schmooze. The rabbi stopped in the middle of the reading of the Torah. And he said, guys, I want you to understand something. The Torah that we are reading is God's instruction to each and every one of us. What we are doing in reading the Torah is God communicating to us his message. And if you say, well, I'm not studying Torah, I'm studying Talmud. Talmud was written by the rabbis.
So look at the Rambam. What does the Rambam teach us in the introduction of the Rambam? He says that Moshe had a notebook and Aaron had a notebook and all of the sages, the elders, the prophets, the early commentaries, the Gaonim, the Tanaim, the Amorim, they all had notebooks. They were all combined into what we know as the Mishnah, the oral Torah. It was orally transmitted, but everyone had their notebook. Rabbeinu HaKadosh, when he wrote the Mishnah, the first of the oral Torah to be written,
he combined all of those books together and then put together a Mishnah. And then the commentaries, then the sages, even during the life of Rabbi Huda Nasi, Judah the Prince, they started writing the Talmud, explaining, elaborating on the details of the code of the Mishnah. The Talmud, the Mishnah, the Halacha is God communicating to us. God is talking to us. God is guiding us in how to live our lives.
The number one responsibility of an educator is to be able to properly give over the message of God from his Torah to the people. Someone who's lacking clarity in their mind because they're intoxicated is going to mess up on that message. And it's the same exact task as the Kohen. As the Kohen, the high priest who was doing the service for the people, was bringing the, what would happen to the offering that was brought? A fire would come from heaven to consume it.
That means this was a place of communicating between heaven and earth. What we are doing here right now in our classroom here in Houston, Texas, in our Torch Center, is exactly the same thing. We are connecting between heaven and earth. And if someone is intoxicated in the process of teaching, then there's a flaw in that connection between heaven and earth. Because you're not in your right mind. You're not going to be able to convey the law properly.
You're not going to be able to convey the communication from God properly. And how does this relate to us on a more granular level? In the things that we do, we need to understand, like the question we had before class. We talked about the power of blessings. We have to go back to the basics. What is the command to recite a blessing? There's no command in the Torah to recite a blessing. But there is. It's a rabbinic decree.
All the blessings that we have are rabbinic decree in nature. Just let's take another step back. Prayer. What is prayer? We think of prayer. We take out a prayer book and we pray. Abraham didn't have a prayer book. Isaac didn't have a prayer book. Jacob didn't have a prayer book. Moses didn't have a prayer book. The men of the Great Assembly, roughly 2,000 years ago, put it together for us. They put together the book that we have, known as a prayer book, the Siddur.
So how was Abraham's prayer if he didn't have a prayer book? What is prayer? Prayer is communicating with God. Just talking to God. I've said this numerous times. Close your eyes. Close the prayer book. Open your heart. Just talk to God. Communicate with God. That's what prayer is. Now, our sages constructed for us a pattern of prayer so that it could be decoded properly. It's just like you have Microsoft, is a software that when you type A,
it puts on your screen A, but really it's a bunch of zeros and ones that are being, it's computing those touches on your keyboard onto the screen. That movement of your mouse onto the screen. We want our prayers to be understood in heaven. The sages encoded the exact code to get the results we are looking for. That's prayer. There's no biblical obligation to read it from a Siddur. There is a biblical obligation, however, to communicate with God and to just talk.
So if we go back to the basics, when we talk about a prayer that's rabbinic in nature, it's biblical in nature not to say God's name in vain. So for a person to just utter the name of Hashem is a biblical prohibition. For a person to recite the blessing the way it's been prescribed by our sages, by the men of the Great Assembly, based on everything that came down from Moses to Aaron, all the way down to them, that's fine within the guidelines.
So if we stick to the basics, it's very easy for one to get confused. It's very easy for a person to get caught up in all of the noise. We have to go back to the basics. I want to share with you, there's been an interesting scandal that's been taking over the community in Lakewood, New Jersey this week. So after Pesach, a new restaurant opened up. And I don't know the exact name of the restaurant, I don't know the exact name of the restaurant,
but it's something like Smash Burger Place, or Joint, whatever the place is. It's basically burgers, but they have potato-made vegan cheese that they put on the burger. And it's supposed to be like a delicacy, like a cheeseburger. It's a cute thing. The Jews don't eat cheeseburger. Torah prohibits us to eat cheese and meat together, milk and meat together. So they had this new innovation now of technology that they can make the potato into taste and feel like cheese.
It melts like cheese, tastes like cheese, but it's not cheese. So there was a rabbi that was addressing it. And the rabbi, I think, did an excellent job dealing with the scandal. So first is there are people who are just uncomfortable with it. Me personally, I don't like such things because I just don't like it. I'll give you an example of something similar. I told my wife this, we had this discussion last night. They have in kosher sushi,
so you can have salmon, you can have tuna, and you can have what they call the California roll, which has mock crab. It's fish. Connie, it's a fish, but it's a mock crab. It's like crab. I don't eat it. I'm not interested in eating crab and not anything that tastes like crab. I'm just not interested, all right? So I don't eat that fish. Is it forbidden? No, it's kosher. It's a kosher fish. Enjoy it. If you enjoy it, enjoy it.
Me personally, I just don't like it. I don't like the idea that I'm eating crab in a kosher form. That's me personally. Halachically, no problem. So the rabbi said, from a halachic standpoint, you got to ask the rabbi. The rabbi says that it's kosher, it's kosher. It's permitted, permitted, finished. Now you want to know from a standpoint of hashkafa, from whether or not on a moral, ethical, whether or not this is the right thing for one to do,
so that every person needs to understand for themselves. Every person needs to make their own decision. Now why was this a scandal? Because allegedly, I don't know the facts about this, allegedly someone went on Uber Eats or one of those apps and ordered what they thought was the kosher thing, but it was from a non-kosher vendor. And they ended up getting delivered non-kosher cheeseburger. Now I don't know if the story actually happened. I don't know if someone actually ordered from a non-kosher place.
I hope not. But people are making a big noise. You see, you're bringing people to sin because now they're ordering, it's becoming a commonplace thing. Again, every person needs to know where they're holding in their own spiritual growth. But God didn't say that it's prohibited. In fact, the Talmud says, we learned this in our Thinking Talmudist series, the Talmud says that there is God, God doesn't want us to miss out on any pleasure in this world. God created this world so that we enjoy.
Oh, but I can't eat pork. So, God created a fish, the Shibuta fish, we learned this in the Talmud, that tastes exactly like pork. So you're not missing out. It's a kosher fish. And you can eat it. See, you're not going to miss out. God says, this do not eat. God says, milk and meat do not eat. Okay, don't eat it. Potato, vegan-like cheese is not milk and meat. It's not a prohibition. But people get caught up in it
because it makes noise. If it bleeds, it leads, right? We mentioned this. We have to be very careful about not making new stringencies upon ourselves. That's number one. And then again, on the hashkafic side of it, the philosophical side of it, we'll discuss this another time. We'll bring it in. But it's the same thing, the same issue that people have with the days of sefirah. You are not allowed to, the halacha says that one should prohibit listening to music
till 33 days of the Omer have been observed. Why? In memory of the students of Rabbi Akiva. So we observe 33 days of mourning. That's why we don't shave, we don't get haircuts, and we don't listen to music So now, people came up with a new idea. Acapella. Acapella. It's just voices. There's no music. Is that prohibited? Oh, people are frowning upon it. Oh, it shouldn't be done because they said... That's not what they said.
No one is dancing from acapella music. But there are people who love this stringency. They love finding another way... God doesn't want you to be miserable. God doesn't want you to be miserable. If you found a loophole, it's not even a loophole. It says music, klei zemmer. It's not klei zemmer. It's not music. So what's the problem? You found a workaround? Enjoy the workaround. God didn't say don't enjoy life. God didn't say don't enjoy a good burger.
God said don't eat milk and meat. Go back to the basics. So I think that when we talk about parashashmini, where there's a prohibition for the Kohen to serve drunk, when it's a prohibition for a rabbi to teach when they are intoxicated, it's so that we don't blur the lines. It's so that we have clarity. When our job is to communicate between heaven and earth, to bring God's message, to make it practical for all of us,
don't blur the lines. We need to have clarity. And that is the most important part of our Jewish life. Have clarity. Know what you're doing, what God wants us to do. We had a question that came up here in our Ask Away series in our Everyday Judaism podcast. The woman asked, I want to come to shul on Shabbos, but I know there's a prohibition to drive. Okay, so what did we answer? We answered very simply. What's a Biblical obligation?
What's a Biblical prohibition? To drive on Shabbos is a Biblical prohibition. To go to shul, it's maybe rabbinic in nature. Maybe. It's a good thing to pray with a quorum, with a minion. But to do a rabbinic, to violate a Biblical for it, is definitely not appropriate. So let's go back to the basics. What does the Torah say? Do not light a fire on Shabbos. Igniting the engine is lighting a fire on Shabbos. The Torah doesn't say anything about
praying with a minion. It's rabbinic in nature. You don't violate a Biblical command for a rabbinic. And therefore it's best to stay home and enjoy Shabbos in your home and don't go to shul. Go to shul on Sunday, and on Monday, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, and on Thursday, and on Friday. Don't go on Shabbos. It's a walking distance. And that's why every single Jewish community, ever in the history of the world, was always established around a synagogue.
First you build a synagogue, then you have the community built around it. And there are priorities in that as well. There needs to be a mikveh for the women. There needs to be a sefer Torah. These are things that are priorities in a Jewish community. Then you move around it. A guy called me up once. I don't know who he was. I got to know him very well later. He calls me up. I said, who is this? He tells me his name.
I said, where do you live? How did you get my number? He says, I just moved to Houston from Atlanta, Georgia. He says, my realtor told me that there's a Jewish community developing. He lived out past Kingwood. That's where he bought a house. Because the realtor told him, yeah, Jews? Habibi. You're about 40, 50 miles away from the Jewish community. It's like, really? You go, you check out, you meet the rabbi, you see that you're a walking distance
to a synagogue. The first thing, I remember when we moved to Harnof, which is a very religious community in Jerusalem. My parents arrived there in the afternoon. Their flight, they came from the airport, and the first thing my father did was find a synagogue, which was right across the street. Found the rabbi, who we can ask his questions to. First thing, the bags weren't unpacked yet. The first thing you do is you need to be part of a community.
That's the responsibility of us as Jews, right? So the problem, and this is a big problem, is that in the 1960s, the conservative movement allowed people to drive to synagogue. I don't know what the motivation was for them to do that, but that's clearly against the Torah. They rescinded that five years later. It was too late. The cat was out of the bag. It was too late. Probably they found that people were moving to suburban areas,
and if we're not going to make it okay for them to drive back to synagogue, we're going to lose the membership. And to compete with the reform, I don't know, again, if that was the motivation or not. Clearly it was not fulfilling the will of Hashem, but that destroyed a whole generation of Shabbat-observant Jews, people who were going to observe. The rabbi said, it's okay, it's okay. And the minute Shabbos is gone, everything's gone. And again,
this is why we need to have clarity in the things that we learn, in the things that we observe, in the things that we observe. We need clarity. Go back. We need to go back to the basics. This is the obligation. This is, I believe, the greatest thing we can learn from the command of Hashem, where Hashem talks directly to Aaron. Do not come intoxicated to the Temple. Do not come intoxicated when you are going to teach Torah. My dear friends, have a magnificent Shabbos, with clarity. Amen.